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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

maggieappleton.com

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Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#151

Post by JohnFen »

fragmede wrote: post #40
JohnFen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don’t learn by figuring out a new concept This. If LLMs were actually some magical thing that could write my code for me, I wouldn't use them for exactly this reason. Using them would prevent me from learning new skills and would actively encourage my existing skillset to degrade. The thing that keeps me valuable in this industry is that I am always improving, always learning new skills. Anything that discourag…

It sounds like you've discouraged yourself from learning the skill of using an LLM to help you code.

I would disagree with that take, actually. Perhaps I haven't yet figured out how to leverage LLMs for that (and don't get me wrong, I have certainly experimented as has most of my team), but I'm not discouraged from it.

I'm just trying to be clear-eyed about the risks. As an example, code completion tools in IDEs will cause me to get rusty in important baseline skills. LLMs present a similar sort of risk.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#152

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bitwize wrote: post #143

Back in the day (1970s-1980s), every computer came with BASIC or something preinstalled -- often in ROM. Growing up I thought computers were for programming as bikes were for riding or pencils were for writing with. Using someone else's program was always an option, but you always had the full capability of the machine ready to put to your own uses, and an easy way to get started. We forwent this in favor of getting…

> We forwent this in favor of getting that consoomer dollar.

We forwent this in favor of empowering the huge number of people who didn't want to program, who just wanted to use the computer to be able to do (nonprogramming) things.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#153

Post by [deleted] »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #64
9dev wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“You‘re right, I apologize for the oversight. Let’s do the same bloody thing exactly the same way again because I don’t know how to answer your question differently but am forced to never admit that…“

Sometimes it goes in circles, fixing one problem, but unfixing one that it had fixed in the previous iteration. I've had that happen several times.

[deleted]

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#154

Post by manuel_w »

rickydroll wrote: post #139
JohnFen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don’t learn by figuring out a new concept This. If LLMs were actually some magical thing that could write my code for me, I wouldn't use them for exactly this reason. Using them would prevent me from learning new skills and would actively encourage my existing skillset to degrade. The thing that keeps me valuable in this industry is that I am always improving, always learning new skills. Anything that discourag…

This all depends on your mental relationship with the LLM. As somebody else pointed out, this is an issue of delegation. If you had one or more junior programmers working for you writing code according to what you specify, would you have the same worry? I treat LLMs as junior programmers. They can make my life easier and occasionally make it harder. With that mindset, you start out knowing that they're going to make…

> I don't write code by hand because my hands are broken, and I can't use the keyboard long enough to write any significant amount of code. I've developed a relationship with nonbiological junior programmers such that I now tell them, via speech recognition, what to write and what information they need to create code that looks like code I used to create by hand.

Can you please write a blog post on what tools you use for that?

My hands are fine, still, I'd love to just verbally explain what I want and have someone else type the code for me.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#155

Post by giancarlostoro »

9dev wrote: post #24

If I have learnt one thing working in software engineering, specifically on AI-enabled products empowering junior engineers, and using Copilot professionally, it’s that you need even more experience to detect the subtleties in the lack of the models understanding of your domain, your specific intent. If you don’t know exactly what you’re after, and use the LLM as a sparring partner to bounce your ideas off, you’re in…

> only treat the model as a smart autocomplete, that doesn’t matter

This is the only way I like to use it. Also in some cases for refactoring instead of sitting there for an hour hand crafting a subtle re-write, it can show me a diff (JetBrains AI is fantastic for my personal projects).

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#156

Post by giancarlostoro »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #129
9dev wrote: post #24

If I have learnt one thing working in software engineering, specifically on AI-enabled products empowering junior engineers, and using Copilot professionally, it’s that you need even more experience to detect the subtleties in the lack of the models understanding of your domain, your specific intent. If you don’t know exactly what you’re after, and use the LLM as a sparring partner to bounce your ideas off, you’re in…

The new generation of devs are going to be barefoot and pregnant and kept in the kitchen , building on top of technologies that they do not understand, powered by companies they do not control.

I assume companies will make the job interview process even worse as a result. I really don't do well with CS heavy interviews. I never studied CS, I studied as your job description notes a RELATED field, I took about five different programming language courses at my college, and have years of experience. I'm not going to talk about algorithms I never use because I build websites.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#157

Post by cptcobalt »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #129
9dev wrote: post #24

If I have learnt one thing working in software engineering, specifically on AI-enabled products empowering junior engineers, and using Copilot professionally, it’s that you need even more experience to detect the subtleties in the lack of the models understanding of your domain, your specific intent. If you don’t know exactly what you’re after, and use the LLM as a sparring partner to bounce your ideas off, you’re in…

The new generation of devs are going to be barefoot and pregnant and kept in the kitchen , building on top of technologies that they do not understand, powered by companies they do not control.

I think this is true as we keep building up abstraction layers. Computers are getting faster yet feel slower as we just want to work with higher level tech which makes it easier to understand less of how the sausage gets made.

But I don't think this is a now problem, in the age of AI, but has been a growing problem for decades as software has matured.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#158

Post by xdavidliu »

logicallee wrote: post #97
deafpolygon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT will gleefully suggest you a wrong approach, just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No when it would be appropriate Therein lies the mistake. Too many people assume ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) are capable of reasoning. It's not. It is simply just giving you what is likely the 'correct' answer based on some sort of pattern. It doesn't know what's wrong, so it's not aware it's gi…

>Too many people assume ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) are capable of reasoning. It's not. Sure it is, just like a child or someone not very good at reasoning. You can test ChatGPT yourself on some totally novel ad hoc reasoning task you invent for the task, with a single correct conclusion that takes reasoning to arrive at and it will probably get it if it's really easy, even if you take great pains to make it something…

As you are making the point, can you please provide the example? If it's really new, posting it as a comment here is not likely to affect LLM training, at least not for a day or so. And even if it is, you can still provide the examples that you are thinking of?

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#159

Post by Foreignborn »

kinda disappointing comments in this thread. Thanks to LLMs I have built more home cooked software than ever.

I’m not an engineer, but I've written more code this year than ever. LLMs have helped me tackle a huge backlog of projects at home that I wouldn't have been able to justify starting before. And I know 3-5 others doing similarly (we have a group chat).

Off the top of my head, this year I’ve made:

- webscrapers

- notification agents

- websites

- data manipulation and charting

- IaC devops for my entire homelab

- an RPG (well, a roguelike)

- applets for OBS

- chrome extensions to glue together a bunch of stuff I do to study Japanese

I’ve written projects in languages I’ve never used like rust and elixir, and learned a ton. Am I gonna switch ladders to be a SWE? Nope, but for better or worse have stopped asking my SWE friends for help.

And lately, between RAG and large context models, it’s much easier to improve existing projects. Typing, refactoring, linting, documentation generation, and GitHub ops are now practically effortless.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#160

Post by finnthehuman »

rickydroll wrote: post #139
JohnFen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don’t learn by figuring out a new concept This. If LLMs were actually some magical thing that could write my code for me, I wouldn't use them for exactly this reason. Using them would prevent me from learning new skills and would actively encourage my existing skillset to degrade. The thing that keeps me valuable in this industry is that I am always improving, always learning new skills. Anything that discourag…

This all depends on your mental relationship with the LLM. As somebody else pointed out, this is an issue of delegation. If you had one or more junior programmers working for you writing code according to what you specify, would you have the same worry? I treat LLMs as junior programmers. They can make my life easier and occasionally make it harder. With that mindset, you start out knowing that they're going to make…

> If you had one or more junior programmers working for you writing code according to what you specify, would you have the same worry?

I try hard to avoid the scenario where junior programmers write things they don’t understand. That’s actually my biggest frustration and the difference between juniors I enjoy vs loathe working with. There are only so many ways to remain supportive and gently say “no, for real, learn what you’re working on instead of hacking something brittle and incomplete together.”

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